Untitled (figurative study)

Horace Brodzky was born in Melbourne in 1885 but left Australia at the age of 20 with his family for the United States, marking the beginning of an international career focused largely on drawing, printmaking and design that would play out between New York and London until his death in 1969.

Brodzky was involved in the avant-garde revival of printmaking in London in the first decades of the 20th century and is considered to be the first Australian to make a linocut print. In 1912 he met French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was instrumental in introducing modern art to England at that time. The two artists were exponents of the vorticist movement, which embraced a style of abstraction inspired by the machine-propelled energy of modern life.

This small linocut of a disrobing female was made the same year as a monograph on his linocuts was published in New York and is a companion to another linocut in the Gallery’s collection (Two female nudes) 1921 (260.2033).